As an artist I am always looking for ways of breaking out of routines and habits. I impose regular colour-fasts on myself. Last summer I experimented with making my own pigments. In 2024 I decided to try making gel prints.
I do not have a printing press and this technique does require one (just gel plates and some paint rollers). The results were quite raw (even crude) but it opened the door on "visual accidents" and surprises. Gel prints can be re-inked or re-used and that allows you create variations on a theme - or in my case the telling of a story, a visual process of unfolding, where I am not in control of everything that happens.
I started experimenting with this technique when I spent one month alone in our forest house in Sweden, in January 2024. I was snowed in. I had to dig a tunnel through the snow to get to our bathroom! I put a jug of drinking water in our little hall by the front door (in case the pipes froze) and accidentally created a giant ice cube! Then I made the snow my ally and allowed the snow to interact with liquid charcoal on white paper. The results were interesting and unusual.
